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Changes in Social Security and Medicare will be central to efforts to bring federal spending in line, President-elect Barack Obama said on Wednesday, as the Congressional Budget Office projected a $1.2 trillion budget deficit for the fiscal year.

“We expect that discussion around entitlements will be a part, a central part” of efforts to curb federal spending, Mr. Obama said at a news conference. By February, he said, “we will have more to say about how we’re going to approach entitlement spending.”

This comes at about the 6:20 mark of the linked video. “We will have some very specific outlines in terms of how it’s going to be done,” he said. Now, maybe this is just me zoning out, but I don’t recall Obama saying anything quite this unambiguous about Medicare and Social Security reform before. And I haven’t read any leaks along these lines either.

On the Medicare front he may just be talking about the impact of his overall healthcare plan, but I don’t have a clue what he might have in mind for Social Security. At a guess, though, he’s got something typically Obamian in mind, a mixed bag of moderate tax hikes (maybe increasing the payroll tax cap, which I think he’s talked about before) and moderate benefit cuts (maybe increasing retirement age a year or two) that will get bipartisan support. Wait and see.

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